Archive for December, 2010

For startups in particular, I view failure as a natural process in a startup career path. If you’re serious about startups, you’re most likely going to fail many times. Promising features will die. Products within your startups will flounder. And whole startups will die. That’s the life you’re choosing.

Most of start-up enthusiasts like me grow up idolizing business tycoons and entrepreneurs. And as one grows trying to become one, she can identify many common traits between herself and some of her idol entrepreneurs. But can this be a reality, do you think great people including famous entrepreneurs are actually born than made?

Under certain conditions, a population of reproducing cells can spontaneously divide into two groups with distinctly different functions. Researchers have long been looking for the reasons behind such a spectacular process but the mechanisms found so far were complicated and did not explain all observed cases. Theoretical calculations and computer simulations carried out by scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPC PAS) in Warsaw have provided the simplest explanation.

"We discovered a statistical law that is responsible for cell differentiation," says Dr. Anna Ochab-Marcinek from the IPC PAS. The new statistical mechanism will possibly allow [us] to rationalize one of the sources of bacteria's resistance to antibiotics and help understand why monozygotic twins and cloned organisms are not their identical copies. A paper describing the discovery appeared in theAProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a scientific journal published by the US National Academy of Sciences.

In the middle of the past century, it had been noticed in laboratory studies that anAEscherichia coli population could divide into two groups, with one of them showing expression of a specific gene, e.g., the gene responsible for production of an enzyme to digest a specific type of sugar, whereas in the other group the same gene remained inactive. The effect is known in science as population bimodality. The observation was intriguing, as all the cells had the same DNA and were kept under the same conditions.

The Paris Metro and the service it provides are deeply intertwined into the fabric of the city. As the 4.5 million Parisians who ride it every day will probably attest it’s the quickest way around whether it’s for work, for play or both. The metro’s distinctive art-nouveau style is unmistakable and the plant like green wrought iron entrances topped with the orange orbs and Metropolitan signage designed byAHector Guimard which sprout up all over the city lead one down to the gleaming white tiled platforms to be whisked away all over the city. On my first trip to Paris I arrived into Gare du Nord and entered the dense maze that is the metro. Despite the crowds, the noise and the distinct odour of piss, I was in love. The kind of love which inspires one to risk life, limb and deportation to get up close and personal.

It was in March, in the drizzle, that I realized my brain was burned out. Like a rusty engine, I could hear it chug-chug and splutter - but it would never quite start running at top speed. I had just come back from a rough month-long work-trip to Bangladesh, and I had an Everest of work in front of me. It was all fascinating, and all urgent - but I was plodding though it at half my normal speed. I needed to be performing at my best; instead I was at my worst. I stared at the London rain from my window, and slogged on.

That's when I stumbled across a small story in an American scientific magazine. It said there was a spiky debate across America's universities about the increasing use by students of a drug called Provigil. It was, they said, Viagra for the brain. It was originally designed for narcoleptics in the seventies, but clinical trials had stumbled across something odd: if you give it to non-narcoleptics, they just become smarter. Their memory and concentration improves considerably, and so does their IQ.

It's not an amphetamine or stimulant, the article explained: it doesn't make you high, or wired. It seems to work by restricting the parts of your brain that make you sluggish or sleepy. No significant negative effects have been discovered. Now students are using it in the run-up to exams as a "smart drug" - a steroid for the mind.

Despite all the well-meaning diversification of measures of human intelligence into such things as emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and the like, (even basketball intelligence!), the big kahuna remains IQ- general cognitive intelligence. This single measure correlates (to various degrees) with a wide variety of real outcomes, such as academic performance, income, social status, longevity, and health. Putting aside the question of how some tests for IQ might be culturally biased and thus merely entrench the social priviledge they are supposedly used to mitigate, IQ has been a scientifically interesting and rigorous measure for a long time.

Pink explains this paradox by highlighting the mechanism of action. Extrinsic rewards harm productivity by displacing intrinsic motivations. But in cases where intrinsic motivations don’t apply (e.g. situations where the work is routine and straightforward), extrinsic rewards increase motivation and productivity.

Businesspeople with good hearts looking to make a difference usually start with three questions: "How can I give back?" "How do I pick a good cause?" and "What skills should I contribute?" But the businesspeople I've met who have made the biggest contribution usually started with a different question: "What can I get?" As a result, they engage more deeply, contribute more of their skills, and do so for longer duration. #cause

--06.10.2012--

It is thus flawed, a weightless, overly romantic attempt at economic analysis, special only in that it is not an entirely boring read. #weightless

--06.10.2012--

Are nature and spirituality compatible, are they aloof colleagues, indifferent and incurious about what the other is saying? #physics

--06.10.2012--

I'm not entirely sure what literary fiction is "supposed" to be...but it is something that we can recognize when we read it, and in terms of speculative stories, it's a suggestion of internal struggle. #weird

Scientists published their work in journals that only scientists read, classicists in volumes that only classicists read, and engineers in blue books that no one read. So the reference book was born---the compendium of facts, the chrestomathy of passages, and the anthology of extracts---by which the rest of us could learn and use the information that print technology was producing, filling bookshelves that could be measured by the mile. #wikipedia